Do Go On - 383 - The Chippendales Murders

Episode Date: February 22, 2023

You may know of the Chippendales Dancers, you may have even been to a Vegas show of theirs. What you might not know is how this male strip show came to be, and the wild antics that went on behind the scenes. Sex, drugs, alcohol, blackmail, arson.... murder. This is a comedy/history podcast, the report begins at approximately 05:11 (though as always, we go off on tangents throughout the report).Support the show and get rewards like bonus episodes: patreon.com/DoGoOnPodLive show tickets: https://dogoonpod.com/live-shows/ Submit a topic idea directly to the hat: dogoonpod.com/suggest-a-topic/Check out our new merch! : https://do-go-on-podcast.creator-spring.com/ Twitter: @DoGoOnPodInstagram: @DoGoOnPodFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/DoGoOnPod/Email us: [e-mail] Check out our other podcasts:Book Cheat: https://play.acast.com/s/book-cheatPrime Mates: https://play.acast.com/s/prime-mates/Listen Now: https://play.acast.com/s/listen-now/Who Knew It with Matt Stewart: https://play.acast.com/s/who-knew-it-with-matt-stewart/Do Go On acknowledges the traditional owners of the land we record on, the Wurundjeri people, in the Kulin nation. We pay our respects to elders, past and present.  REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING:https://open.spotify.com/show/3peO5EoD0YeRh7xcFMncDM?si=33df4ed2ab2b408chttps://allthatsinteresting.com/chippendales-murdershttps://abc7chicago.com/chippendales-murders-chippendale-2020-abc-news-read-scott/11100167/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chippendaleshttps://nypost.com/article/dark-history-of-chippendales/https://www.writersandeditorsofcolor.com/black-history-365-how-one-black-law-student-led-a-law-suit-against-chippendales-ce8a63a2a0e2 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Melbourne and Canada, we got exciting news for you. And we should also say this is 2026. Jess, what year is it? 2026. Thank God you're here. Right now, I'm in Melbourne doing my show with Serengy Amarna 630 each night at the Cooper's Inn Hotel, having so much fun. We'd love to see you there. Canada, we are visiting you in September this year.

If you've somehow missed the news, we are heading up Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal and Toronto for shows. That's going to be so much fun. Tickets for all this stuff, I believe, are online. And I'm here too. Hello and welcome to another episode of Do Go On. My name is Dave Warnikey and as always I'm here with Matt Stewart and Jess Perkins. It's a me, Jess Perkins. It's a me, Matt Stewart and just quickly and just quietly.

How good is it to be alive? You actually said that at a regular volume. Yeah, and why quietly? Why not shout it? Yeah. How good it is to be alive? Live like just you don't have to hold you. You don't have to make yourself smaller for other people's benefit, you know?

How good is it to be alive? Slightly louder. And you know what, Matt, if I can be honest with you for a moment as a friend. Please. You lit up from within when you finally let yourself be you. That felt good. Yeah. It felt nice to show the world who I am.

Yeah. And you're a guy who thinks it's good to be alive. Absolutely. It's nice to be here. It's more of a question. How good is it? No one ever answers. It's pretty good, I guess.

Yeah. Better than the alternative, I suppose, you know, being dead. Oh. Or not being alive, which I guess similar things. I thought you meant being double alive. That's too much. That's too alive. I don't know what opposite means.

If you're not alive, you can't explain how the show works. And Matt, because you are alive, you can do that right now. I can. Well, how it works is one of the three of us, me, Jess and the third guy. The rest, please. Name David. We get a topic assigned to us, usually with the help of a listener, suggestion, and then maybe a vote from the patrons.

And then we go away. just do a deep dive in it and we write up a kind of a school report and come back to the class and give a little oral presentation while the other two interrupt relentlessly and two, you know, sort of tedious extremes. And we normally get on the topic. It's a good name for a podcast. Teens extremes? I like that too. We normally get on a topic with a question. Jess, have you written a question this week? I have written a question. My question is, what was the 1970s equivalent of Magic Mike. Oh, the full Monty.

Oh, yeah, that's probably pretty similar. Magic Mike, so this is the strip show movie, 1970s. So we're thinking... Debbie does Dallas? U.S., okay, so that's a porno. Okay. What's Magic Mike? I mean, it's just like a strip show kind of thing.

Okay. We're thinking the U.S. We're thinking live show. Oh, you watch the TV show about it. Oh, my God. Is this about the Chipmunks? No, there's just. Chippendales?

Chippendales. Whoa, this is awesome. Have you just watched the show? I watched the show and apparently it differs wildly from the real story. Because I haven't watched it because I was worried about exactly that. And every time I watch a movie that's based on a topic, I'm like, oh, that happened. And then you read, you know, I didn't want to poison my brain. Right.

You've watched the recent one, like the Hulu one? Yeah, great. With, um, who stars in it? Camel. Yeah, comedian. Yeah. And it was, I loved it. I thought it was great.

But I'm like, wait, what? I started watching it thinking it was just like one of those sort of comedy shows, like, glow or something like that. Yeah, fucking love low. Bit of drum, a bit of comedy. But it was like, wait, what? It's pretty full on, isn't it? And apparently it's quite a famous story, but I knew nothing of it.

And look, there's been like a few docos out about it, but there weren't a heap of, like, detailed written sources. A lot of, like, the articles and stuff kind of just really gloss over stuff. So I listened to this, like, 10-part podcast called Welcome to Your Fantasy, which only came out, I think last year, and it's really, really great. So if people like this story and want to hear more about it in more detail, definitely go listen to that. But yes, it's about the Chippendale.

It's so funny that I've literally, I finished watching that two weeks ago. Yeah, nice. And I had no idea what the answer to that question was. Yeah, Chimunks. And I only knew the answer because you told me, like, briefly in an airport a few weeks ago, yeah, I've been watching this show. Cool. Yeah, nice.

So let the guy John keeping track of the score. that I totally set that one up for Matt. Can I get half a point or something? His name's Bob. Is that your nickname for him? Maybe that's why he doesn't give you many skills. All right John, listen to me. John, you son of a bitch. That's why he's been ruining me. This topic is suggested by a few people. Melanie,

Will Vickery and Bracken Markens. Oh, it's such a great name of Bracken Markens. And voted on by our Patreon supporters. So it's a pretty fun story. Well, it's not at all, but you'll hear. hear it, but... That's great, because I'm going in completely blind over here. Just a guy in an airport told me about a TV show. We get it, Dave. You fly.

He's a jet setter. Oh, my God. He was in the lounge, probably. No, I wasn't even flying. They know him, so you weren't flying. I was buying a magazine. At the airport. It's the only place to get him these days.

I think it'd be cheaper at a news agent, mate. Oh, I hadn't thought about that. Oh, dear dim. He's writing a note down in his notepad. News agent. I'm underlining it with a felt pen. And a big question mark. Look up what is news agent?

Well, I'm going to start this story in 1965 when a young man named Soman Banerjee leaves Bombay, now Mumbai, and arrives in Canada before ending up in L.A. He worked for a time as a janitor before borrowing some money from a friend and using it to buy not one, but two mobile gas stations. Two. Why start with one? I love that when you're borrowing money from a friend, the friend's like, how much you need? Can you just buy one first? Yeah.

Does it have to be two? Is it a two-for or something? Could have been a two-for. Oh, so one of those ones where it's on either side of the highway and it just mirrors the other one. Oh, I love those. And hate them. I love those.

I love those. Do you know what I think every time? That's one of the weirdest things I've ever heard. I love those. No, because if they had something better on the other side, I'd get jealous. Oh, okay. So I'm glad it's the same. It saves from FOMO.

But also, I, you know, here's what I often think about when I'm driving past one of those service stations where they have one on each side. I'm like, let's say you work at the Mac is there. How do you know which one you work at? Because it would be like northbound or southbound. I don't know what that means. Yeah.

I think they often work at both, right? Exactly. So how would I know where my shift is? That would happen all the time. They rock up to the wrong one. Surely. You're not working here. You're working over there.

How are you going to get across there? Yeah, it's like take your half an hour to go to a U-turn. Wild. So that's what I think about on road trips. That's what I love them. So he's bought two mobile gas stations. and the timing could not have been better. Oh, great.

Because this was just before the oil crisis of 1973, which saw gas prices double and then triple, which was terrible for everybody, but great if you owned the gas station. Ah, wait, why? Well, it must just be that, like, you're making a lot of cash. Right. So the cost went up for him to buy it,

but he put it up even higher, I guess. I would guess so, or, yeah, yeah. The crisis was, I've just bumped the prices up real life. That's a crisis. What are you going to do? the gas over there? Well, I own that place too. Sucker! Good luck.

Got you over a barrel of gas. Only a couple of years later in 1975, Banerjee took the profits from the gas station and bought a cocktail lounge called The Round Robin. He saw this as the first step towards emulating one of his heroes, Hugh Hefner. Loved Heff. He's also going by Steve at this point. So Steve Banergy is the main character of this story. That sounds like a comic book superhero.

Steve Banergy? Banergy. Banergy. Yeah, it's pretty good. Disco, was taking over New York, it was big, but it hadn't quite made the same splash on the West Coast yet, and Steve wanted to get in ahead of the game. He immediately renamed the round robin to Destiny 2. And no, there was no Destiny 1.

Yeah, I think in the show he said something like, it just makes it sound like it's the second one. Yeah. You know, he's sort of like faking it until he makes it. Yeah. Why not call it Destiny 32? There's a whole chain of these. I'm very successful. I'm a very successful businessman.

It's just such funny logic. if that's how we thought about it. Yeah. So the podcast I mentioned, welcome to your fantasy. It's hosted by a historian and Natalia Petrazella, who's done quite a lot of research into,

well, she's like a professor in modern history of the US, particularly she's done a lot of research into the 70s in California. Yeah, specialising in stripping, yeah. Yeah, it's business, so. I'm purely academic. Just watching a lot of tapes.

You know, I just see, I mean, if I don't get it really paint a picture, then I don't think I can tell the story. So I'm just watching a lot of, A lot of stripper tapes For work This is all for business Some of them are much more modern

I gotta compare it to something Yeah If I don't know what they're doing now How can I talk about the history If you don't learn from history You're bound to repeat it Watch more stripper tapes All I've said is modern history of the US

I'm up to my e-balls In muddy stripper tapes I close my eyes It's all I can see Tirating Leather thongs Leather thongs Leather thongs

Tets twitching Better grip A bit of popcorn Okay I would yeah I recommend the podcast It's very detailed And it's kind of

It's been a very helpful Resource to like Create the framework of this So Natalia explains That the 70s was a fantastic time To get into the entertainment industry in LA It was like a good time to start Because

I wish I'd known that then I know fuck Yeah If you had a time machine I'd go back and I'd get in the entertainment industry in the 70s. Yeah. There was this huge cultural shift, which meant that Hollywood was seeing a new generation

of autos and actors. And the mid-70s was a golden age for porn. There was a sexual revolution that saw people feeling more free in their sexual expression. A New York Times critic Richard Blumenthal coined the phrase, Porn-o-sheek, to describe the way porn was being taken more seriously by people in the film world. So you've got Hollywood stars, musicians, porn stars all hanging out in the clubs and at the Playboy Mansion, which was like very close.

to Destiny 2. And the social scene was filled with alcohol, drugs and a lot of sex. So it's like a wild time. It's a great time to be opening a nightclub. And this was the world in which Steve Banerjee thought he could make his fortune. He's like, I'm going to tap into this. So it was all about, what for him, it was about the just the business, making the money. Yeah.

And he thought. As opposed to? Or, you know, being, because he went from a successful business with the, he sold the gas stations. Yeah. Which were doing very well. Yeah. And he could have kept going that way.

But I think they kind of made it seem like in the show that maybe he was also, he wanted to be, you know, in the hip business a bit. Yeah, I'm sure there's, yeah. It is kind of capitalizing on what's popular and cool at the moment for sure. And yeah, like that Hugh Hefner lifestyle of being very lavish and stuff. I think he wanted that. If he, that's the hero. Yeah, and dressed himself, you know, in a very like cool.

Dressing gowns. Dressing gowns. Ropes. But he was always like, I think pretty done up. and in like, yeah, coolish clothes of the time. So the only problem was Destiny 2 wasn't a high-end nightclub. It was essentially a dive bar in the industrial section of West L.A. Oh, dear.

Bruce Nahen was a 24-year-old law student studying for the bar and often found himself studying at his local dive bar, Destiny 2. Studying for the bar at the bar. How else can you get it done? Exactly right. They make that joke a lot. Well, joke. They make that comment a lot in the podcast.

That's good stuff. It's good stuff. I just say if it's good enough, For them, it's good enough for me. Agreed. You know what, uh, what was the name of this story? Natalia Petrazzella. She watched a lot of stripper tapes.

She was barring up, if you know what to me. Oh my God. Oh, my God. Nobody said anything about it. You've made up the stripper tape thing. Yeah. That's what we do on this show. We make up bullshit.

We go on bullshit rich. What are you talking about? That's not actually true. Where are you getting this from? I've never said that. What we do on this show is make extremely obvious jokes, bar and bar. That's the kind of thing we do, man. Yeah, that's a good stuff.

Low-hanging fruit, grab it. He is. What was barring up, if not low-hanging fruit? Well, that's a bit more, too conceptual for me. So he became quite friendly with the owner, Steve Banergy. And once he'd passed the bar, he became Steve's lawyer. By 1978, the bar was busy on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, but completely dead every other night of the week. They tried lots of different events and novelties to fill the space.

dinner theatre, magic shows. They brought in female mud wrestling one night a week, which was successful, but Steve, still not satisfied. Really, because Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, that sounds pretty good. Three nights a week, you're doing all right. Three nights a week. Yeah. Yeah, that's good work-life balance.

Yeah, four days off, three days on. Sick. Quiet days, get all the cleaning done. Yeah. You know, clean up all the vomit. The admin. Yeah. Do the pay slips.

So now the invoices. Rest off the fridge. You know, bar stuff. That's not what I got in this business for. I'm going to know, for the glamour, for the mud. And the strippers. And the strippers. Did he ever get in the show?

And I'll probably should stop. No, I love it. But he, um, in that, and I know so much of apparently they just, you know, just made up. A big creative license. Yeah. But they made it that he started it as a backgammon club. Yes. Yeah.

So at one point he, I don't know if it was that he, the Destiny 2 was a backgammon club. Right. I think they merged two things together. Yeah, yeah. He was at one point running like a backgammon club too. And it just didn't quite work. He's like, this is going to be my way to the Playboy Mansion. To the top.

Backgammon. Yeah. Snick guys, buddy. So, yeah, he wanted Destiny 2 to be a hot destination club. The biggest and most popular places in LA. He wanted it to be like the place to be. It does sound like in the title that it's the second place you go to in a night though, doesn't it?

Yeah. You start somewhere else and then you go to the second destination. Destiny 2. Kick-ons. Yeah. The kick-on club. It's a bit like we used to go to the Hawthon Hotel for uni night. And then if you were still wanting to party when that closed up, you'd go over to cheers.

Cheers, yes. Where you could toss the boss. Toss the boss. That was a good night. Do you want to explain the concept of Toss the boss? Because it does sound like you're wanking off a manager of a bar. Yeah. How else do you think you get free drinks?

It's basically you lob to coin and you, you, You basically, you could either get a cheap drink or a spray. It was free. It was free. No, didn't you have to have a coin or they? No, that, well, I don't remember if you had to BYO a coin, but it was essentially like, you'd place your order for the drinks and you go, I want to toss the boss. You'd flip a coin and if you won heads or tails, you'd get the drinks.

For free. And if not, you had to pay. I think it was a minimum of two drinks at a time or something. Yeah. I'm merging two memories. There was this other bar that had a wheel and you spin it and it was either. either free, free beer, free basic spirits, or getting squirt in the face, by the, with the water gun.

And you could pay to be squirted in the face? Did you want squirted in the face? Like if you were hos. No, that was like the booby prize. That's the gamble. Yeah, right. Eating in a free drink or humiliated. How strange.

So, yeah, cheers. I don't think it's there anymore. It's just flipping the coin. Yeah. That's right. I didn't go to tease that much, but I think it was free drinks. That was Tuesdays. Yeah, because it was uni night.

And then Fridays there was Switch, uh, heavy metal nightclub. Yeah. Metal and punk. That was such a, yeah. Great spot. Great spot. Many happy memories. But the point here is that that's the second place.

It's not a classy establishment being the second destination. Oh, yeah. I mean, the Hawthon got pretty fucking gross too by the end of that night. But then they'd kick you out at like midnight. And then, and now I just like, I walk past that to get treats for my dog now. And I'm like, ugh. So many memories. Anyways, yeah, he wants it to be, he wants it to be the Hawthon Hotel.

Yep. You know, not. Tossing the boss on the horse on hotel, that's a different story. Yeah, that is wanking the bus. Yeah. So clubs would often rebrand every few years to appear to be new and fresh and to attract some attention again. Destiny 3.

So Stephen Bruce brainstormed and came up with a new name, Chippendales, name. named after a British furniture builder from the 1700s, that's right. And taught me through that. I have no idea. They thought it sounded classy, yeah. I thought it sounded like a classy name. And when did the cartoon series Chippendales Rescue Rangers come out? I don't know.

Because that's what it makes me think of. Maybe that's what I'm thinking of. But, yeah, I think it was just like high-end sort of custom-built type fancy. From the 1700s. beautiful. Chasse Lange. How do you say that word? Shays Longer.

Chase Lounge. Chase Lounge. Haven't you heard of the wet leg song? Haven't you heard of the Shays Lung, on the Shays Lung. Yeah, that's the song that made me realize. I'm like, oh, oh no. My mom's always called it a Shays Lounge. Yeah, that's what I thought.

Which I think is probably fine too. I would feel like a bit of a wank and be like, please take a seat on the Shays Long. You know what I mean? Shays Long. I'd be like on that seat over there. Dave, you're all learning French. Is that feels French? I haven't covered it in my...

I haven't got the furniture yet. Let us know. Let us know. So anyway, a fancy new name, surprisingly, doesn't magically fix all of their problems. By 1979, Steve's almost out of money and he's running out of ideas. But that same year, he meets Canadian nightclub promoter Paul Snyder. He just arrived in L.A.

and was looking to make it as a club promoter in the US. So he told Bannergy about a show he'd seen in Vancouver, a gay male strip tease show that had been really successful. So he told Steve that he should. do a male review show at Chippendales, but not targeted to gay men, but to straight women. Are you looking up Chippendales now? I'm listening. When did it start?

The cartoon started in 1943. Oh, wow, okay. So maybe it was named after the Chipponks. Well, I don't think it was, but it's funny that maybe he didn't know it because he didn't grow up in America. Maybe he didn't know about the cartoon. Yeah. And he's thinking, everyone's going to associate this with the fancy furniture.

Yeah, not the cartoon. Chipmunks. Like calling a shot like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Yeah. You sell turtles. So yeah. It's just like that day. They've been pitched the idea of like do a male strip show for the ladies.

And Banerjee had very little to lose. They decided to give it a go. They're like Snyder will MC. They'll split the profits. They take out radio ads. They put up signs in women's bathrooms at venues all around town. Snyder visits gyms and beaches and finds a handful of guys who are willing to take their clothes off for tips. According to Banergy, 600 women turned up.

on the first night. 600. That's a hot start. The place can hold maybe 250 max. Wow. 600 people have turned up. It's an instant success and becomes a weekly Wednesday night show. Snyder's girlfriend, soon to be wife, Dorothy Stratton, was a playboy model and would often

be at shows with some of her playboy friends, which obviously added to the status of the club and the show itself. Like all, if cool people are hanging out there, you know, that bumps it up, you know? Much like when we go to places. Yeah, we're invited to nightclub openings all the time. All the time and we're always like, busy. Oh, gosh. I'm going to be in Prague that night.

Sorry. If I could, I'd toss the boss, but I'm afraid I'll be in Europe. I'm afraid I will not be available to toss Le Boss. Yeah. And they say, it's only 50 bucks, you know, just normal cover charge for you. When I say, mm. Basically, every now and then we see a flyer for an event. And we go, ugh.

Can you just leave us alone? Oh, they just always want us to be at all these events. We're so busy and sought after. Oh, a missing cat. Another thing I've been invited to. But there is a problem with the show. Paul is a shit emcee. He's not funny.

He doesn't have stage presence. He's not bringing the kind of energy that the show needs. Damn it, Paul. So they bring in a radio DJ and wannabe actor Richard Bash, who skillfully whips the women into a frenzy before the dancers have even hit the stage. After his first night of emceeing, Benagie pulls him aside and says, I'm going to need you here every Wednesday. So Paul Snyder's ditched.

Despite this being his idea, he's kicked out. Well, completely, not even just into the background. He's kind of like, he's really a side note in this whole story. He never really comes up that much. But yeah, he was around at this time. Do they, is Paul Snyder in there? Yeah, they, I think they moved time around a bit and have him more involved for a bit longer. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And his partner, I don't know if this came up, but I looked it up after the episode. His partner supposedly suggested the cuffs and bow ties. Yes, that's right, yeah. So they, their sort of custom look, is bow ties and like cuffs on there, which is very similar to the Playboy Bunny look, where they're kind of also in like cuffs and collars. And apparently,

because Dorothy was a Playboy Bunny, she sort of spoke to Heff and he said that was fine that they do that as well. Really? So it was kind of through her. She spoke to Heaf. Yeah, she knew Heath. Because she was playmate of the month or something around that time.

She was, you know, mover and shake her in there. Probably there being treated really well by half, I reckon. Nice. Do they say in the series what happens to them? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So I just, I've written it down as like a quick sad side note because it's worth mentioning,

but it's very sad. So sad. So Paul Snyder, the guy who is pretty much his idea. He created it and then he got cut out. He got cut out. The following year after sort of being cut out, he dies. And he having killed his wife, Dorothy and then by the looks of it himself. Oh.

Really, really sad. And they were both very young, especially. her, I think she was like 20 or something. Really sad. Wow, that's awful. Yeah. So just a fun little, very depressing, very sad side note there. That in the series, that bit, it took me by surprise.

I was thought it was this sort of fun show, glow type show. And I'm like, wait, what the fuck? What's going on? Yeah. Right. Yeah, very sad. But the Wednesday night show continues. With the new MC.

With the new MC. Crowds of women flocked to the club every single single. all week. On more than one occasion, police shut down the show and arrest some of the dancers and organizers for public indecency. But as it turns out, Banerjee had called local TV stations and said that police were raiding the bar and making arrests

and then called the police and said they're getting naked in here. Because any publicity is good publicity, baby. Which is a pretty clever PR move from somebody who was really struggling to get his club off the ground for years. Yeah, from a backgammon guy. Yeah, it's not a bad move. I've been playing good cop

and bad cop on the phone at the police. They get naked in here. I've tried everything. I can't control them. It's wild. You better come down here and make them put their shirts on. Yeah. So it was illegal at the time to have strip clubs?

Well, probably not women taking their clothes off. Right. I'm sure that's fine. But men? No, but there was, I think it's pretty funny. There's like, I can't remember who it was who said this in the Welcome to Your Fantasy, but it was like the, oh, I think it was Richard Barsh, actually, the MC, the new MC. and he was like the police were like, you're exposing?

And he was like, exposing what? And like the buttocks. And he's like, well, I mean, where does a buttox start and end? You know, the big questions. They have to get technical. Yeah, exactly. Is it this? Is it one inch of crack?

Tell me, I'll keep lowering the G-string and you let me know. So to set the scene a little bit about what the shows looked like, the audience of exclusively women were seated in stadium-type seating around a smallish dance floor of stage. So they're looking down on the male dancers. Right. Like, like tiered seating as a Colosseum. Yeah, yeah.

Coercine. Mini Colossame. Incredible. Barsh is in a tux and roller skates. So good. Skating out, gliding around the stage of the microphone. The venue holds maybe 150 people, but most nights is closer to 300 women in the club. Wow.

The dancers come out one at a time in various cheesy costumes. First up is Cowboy Dan, then Superman, then the Barbarian. All this good stuff. Along with the dancers on stage, there are other men walking around the club, kind of waiters slash, I don't know, they're just kind of,

they're like keeping the vibe fun. They're checking in with ladies, they're making the ladies feel good about themselves. Hey, you're having fun? Yeah, they're kind of doing that. And this included the signature move of Chippendales,

the tip and kiss, where a woman would just hold up a dollar and one of these waiters would go over to her, take the dollar and give her a smooch. Okay. Which, man sounds like a recipe for herpes

yeah right in the early days the show itself was pretty shit these men are not dancers they're not performers they're hot guys with hot bodies who have just been found at the gym or at the beach right so they're not like

yeah they've kind of stumbled into this because somebody's seen them and been like you want to make some money but it was the first of its kind and women of all ages from all walks of life were seeing a show that had never been made for them. And that's something to address early on too, because whatever your feelings are towards shows like this and even modern equivalents like Magic and Thunder from Down Under

and stuff like that. Before the 70s, there were so many shows and venues where women took their clothes off for a male audience, but women had never been given license to express themselves, express and celebrate their sexuality, their desires. And the shift in the power dynamic was really, really exciting at the time. You know, and like, was it still pretty gross and inappropriate by today's standards? Absolutely, yes. Part of it you're watching or you're listening and you're like, ugh. But it truly was a different time. And yeah, it's so strange. Like, women are just as capable of making these male dances feel very uncomfortable. And in a lot of circumstances, they really did. Right. This is a quality. Is this what you wanted? I don't know. I think it's just important to note that

the time that this story's happening in and how empowering and liberating this show was for the bulk of its female audience. It was like a big step. As a feminist, I for one, applaud women for abusing these dancers. Not all women. Not all of them. Some of them were just looking at them going, oh, it's pretty funny because like hearing them talk about it on welcome to your fantasy and in documentaries, their memories of things aren't really the most reliable. Like the lawyer, Bruce Nahen, says on the podcast, oh, it was empowering. I think Chippendales had a lot to do with the sexual revolution. And now their daughters are able to run for president of the United States and go into

spaceships and fighter jets. And I'm not so sure Chippendales didn't have a lot to do with that. He goes on saying, maybe I'm delusional. But I think it was all part of that second wave of feminism that opened up women's equality. A lot of people don't know this, but Hillary Clinton's mom was a regular there. Yeah. I just think that's such a stretch. Apparently, after he said that, he pointed at one of the producers and said, Chippendales is the reason she can wear pants. No way. No irony. No, he's serious. He thinks that Chippendales is the reason. Because the men took off their pants so the

women could wear them. Yeah. It's beautiful. It is beautiful. How about you wear these? I got these for you. Now women just wear all these blood not pants. And having watched the docos and her the things, is that true in any way? I mean, no. Okay. I don't think Chippendales is the reason that women can go to space now. No, I think that's a stretch.

I think it's like a, it's very telling of the time. But I mean, there's still shows like this that exist and, yeah, I don't know. But what you don't realize, Jess, is that NASA had a little stall set up. In one of the corners of the club with a, like, a mailing list clipboard. Yeah. And women, you know, some women signed up for those, including, you know, some of those famous women astronauts. Like. Krista McCallor.

It was the, that was the primary school teacher. Yeah. Yeah, she was there. Primary school teachers can go to strip shows. Yeah. Anybody can. They can now. Thanks to Chippendales.

Thanks to Chippendales. They changed everything. Before that, it was frowned upon. It's such a, yeah. It's really. really, there's parts of it listening to this and looking at it through a modern lens where you're just like, ugh, yuck. But, you know, everyone's...

I forget that you're a prude. No, no, no, I just mean the way that some of the men talking about the benefits of being a Chippendale's dancer and... Oh, okay. Yeah. I don't know. It just feels a little bit... What are we talking like?

Dental plan? Dental plan, good health care tips. Lots of puss. Oh, yeah. I see. They're like, you go straight to the top of every woman's list on a whole world. everybody wants to have sex with you. And I'm like, I don't.

Just hearing you talk like that. But, okay. But Steve Banergy wasn't in it for the feminism, okay? He was in it for the cold hard cash. Right. In the early 80s, Steve was approached one night after the show by a man named Nick DeNoya. Nick was an Emmy Award winning producer for his children's TV show, Unicorn Tales, and it worked as a kid's TV producer for quite a while.

He told Banergy, he wanted to partner with him and put Chippendales on the map. He said, let me choreograph and direct a new show. Your show sucks. Let me make it good. And it did. I know kids TV. I'm qualified to do this adult-only show. I can do this.

And he was like, yeah, he was a choreographer, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Choreographer. He was a choreographer. He choreographed. Yes. And the original, the show as it was was very self-taught, non-trained dancers, having a go. Essentially, the dancers would like come out, do a little thrust.

take off their clothes and then just run out into the crowd, take all the cash they could, all the tips and like run off. So it wasn't very slick, it wasn't very professional. So it's more of like a take your pants over than a robbery. That's right. Take your pants off, rob those women. And Nick was like, you know, I see the appeal here. I can make this really good.

In many ways, Steve and Nick were polar opposite. Steve was quiet, awkward, self-conscious, tended to hang at the back of the club by himself. Nick was gregarious, personable and commanded a room. They'd often butt heads having full-blown fights and screaming matches at each other. But Steve wanted mainstream success and Nick was the person who could get Chippendales there. Right. So Nick Danoia was a perfectionist and pushed his dances to nail the choreography he made

and wanted to make the show as entertaining as it was suggestive. He was like, I want to tell stories, you know? I wanted to be a narrative. I want people to be able to connect with the characters. Yeah, so they're like a strip would come out dressed as an acorn. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

And then they would plant themselves in the ground. Yeah. And then a big strip of tree would start to grow. And then the strip of the tree would take off its leaves. Yeah. Then the bark would come off. Yeah. And then the tree would start to bleed sap.

Yeah, would get very, the wood, something, something. All right. It's all beautiful stuff. It's beautiful. Tells a beautiful story. Nick's influence was immediately obvious. the show changed dramatically and was less of a slapdash comical show and became a proper production. Several people who were around at the time said Nick had an ability to know what women wanted

and what women found sexy. Because he got electricied in the bath. Yeah, and now he could read women's minds. Is that what happens to Mel? I think that's what happens to Mel in that movie. Something like that. In fact, every man that is interviewed in the podcast is like, oh yeah, he knew what you wanted better than you actually know.

And they said that to a woman. and she said, and she said, did you ever consult women? And they were like, nah, we didn't need to. We consulted Nick.

Nick knew what they wanted. And then they interview women who were working with them at the time and the women are like, what? I don't think Nick knew what women wanted. It's so funny. All the men are like,

wow, he's got a sixth sense. He just knows what's going to drive the ladies crazy. And the women are like, what? No. Nick, that's creepy guy?

Did you ask any women what they like? Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, no need. So funny. If you did know what they wanted, I guess this company's about to take a big nose dive. No women came anymore, I assume. No, not a single woman. Why are you always defending the gross man?

Why are you always defending Nick Denaoya? Because he was played by this great Australian actor. Yeah. The guy from the first season of... Murray. Murray Bartlett. Yes, Murray Bartlett plays him. He's so good.

He killed it in the White Lotus. I just, yeah. His character's so great in the show. Well, now I'm on board the Denauea train. as he should be. Nick knows what women want and so does but Murray. If I ever personally, if I ever think, what do women want?

You know who I go to? Nick Denoy. Nick, oh my God. Yeah, that's what I go to. Well, that's who I go. I'm like, Nick, do I like this? And he tells me. Yeah, right.

Because he knows better than I know myself. So a woman called Candace Mayeron, who worked for Nick as a producer, described the show as from the first moment, everybody is out of their chairs, screaming and excited. It's like a touchdown run at the Super Bowl, but it goes on for two hours. It never stops.

You know what this sounds like to me? Nick the noyer knows what women want. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Nick the noir. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I never said he doesn't know what women want. Just that women said he doesn't know what he wants.

That's all I said. What did I know? Just women that knew him. Women who were there who were actually putting in all the suggestions for these. They're like, no, he didn't know shit. And remember, it's the 70s. The sexual revolution. Women in particular are able to feel free and liberated to express their sexuality.

So the club is not just a place for a fun show. It is a wild party every single week. The male dancers are being offered stacks of cash to have sex with women in various places in the club. There's so much cocaine and so much alcohol and people are doing things that through a modern lens are somewhat horrifying. But it was, we hope, all consensual, people just haven't a wild time. Nick was in talks with some club owners in New York, and they came to see the show in L.A. The show impressed them immediately, and they were keen to open a Chippendales on the East Coast as well. So Chippendales is expanding.

Nick moves back to New York and ran the show there while Steve stays in L.A. The New York show was massive and fancier than the L.A. original. Opening night was like the opening of a Broadway show. It was big. There were celebs. Apparently, Brooke Shields had a 21st birthday party at Chippendales or something like that. Right. Andy Warhol was offered there.

Like, it's just a cool place to be. That's the big two. The big two, Brooke Shields. Your Warhol and Shields. Yeah. Oh, my God. Holy moly. Nick is appearing on TV shows and talk shows,

and he's talking up how packed the shows are, how well it's going. And they're both, like, everyone's making good money. The whole sort of Chippendell's franchise is doing really well. And remember, Steve loves money. But what starts to really piss Steve off is the attention that Nick is getting, and how often he's being credited with the creation of Chippendales. Oh, whoa.

He's being brought on to TV shows as the founder, the creator of Chippendales. And Steve's like, the fuck? The fuck, that's my friend Paul. And this would be a chip on Banerjee's shoulder that would fuel resentment, anger, and eventually murder. Murder!

Yeah, that murder before wasn't the only murder, Dave. Really? What? Oh, this is good for me because I've got no idea Is it going to be Steve taken on denouia, denouya taken on Steve? Someone else. Oh, we'll find out. Well, right after this.

So, there's clubs in L.A. and New York packing in crowds of screaming women night after night. The Chippendale dances wrong. No, sorry. Yes. Screams of pleasure or pain. Bit of both. Yeah, fear. Oh, I forgot to mention it's like a haunted house show.

Oh, my God. They're doing a lot of jump scares. That goblin looks so real. I'm frightened. Chipperdale dancers are on billboards. They're doing spots on TV shows. They're in ads. And Nick was very particular about what his dances were allowed to talk about and the image

of the club that the dancers were to portray. They weren't allowed to tell stories of anything that made it seem sleazy or hinted any of the sex, drugs and partying that happens. Right. Apparently, like on one TV show one time, one of the dance, like somebody says, like, what's the biggest tip you've ever got? And a guy, one of the dancers, like, says he got like a roll of $20 bills or something. It was like a couple hundred bucks, and he sort of went to, I think, he went to thank the lady or something.

And she was like, your mind for the night. And he was like, no, no, no, you can't buy me. He'd take your money back. And she pulled a gun on him. And he's telling that story on live TV. And then he's like, sorry, Nick, you probably didn't know that story. And Nick's just sitting there looking furious. Oh, wow.

Because they're trying to kind of, obviously there's a lot of people who are very against it. There's lots of particularly religious groups protesting or on some of these talk shows. they'll have the audience weigh in. Some people are like, it's great, you know, it's so liberating. And it's finally women are allowed to express themselves. And then other people being like, you know, God's going to get you out of that sort of five. So they're trying to, Nick especially sort of trying to like make it appear a little bit more family friendly than it is. Yeah, sure.

But really, it's a fuckfest 3,000. Like it's wild. 3,000. That's the updated model. The guy has Helen Roller Scates, welcome to Fuckfest 3,000. Thousand, thousand, thousand. In the year of 3000. Get ready to get fath.

It's that kind of vibe. Okay, right, right. But on the talk show, they're like, we are fun for the whole family. It's just a bit of fun. There's a crates. There's a coloring competition. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Nick's pretty pissed off about that.

But yeah, yeah. So he's trying to kind of control, like. the image. Another business decision that launched the Chippendales into world wide fame was the same decision that would be the tipping point for the downfall of these two men. Nick proposed to Steve that he'd take a group of the dancers on a national tour. They could perform all over the country to previously untapped audiences. This part of the Chippendale's story is usually referred to as the napkin deal. Steve signed a napkin saying that Nick owned the rights to the touring show in perpetuity. Dan Peterson, one of the dancers, was at the meeting and he

He alleges that Steve did not know what perpetuity meant. And he said, Steve saw the touring show as a profitable idea, but future conversations made it fairly clear that he had not realized that he'd signed the ownership of all of those profits over to Nick. So, Nick said, I'm going to take a tour on the road, but I want, like, all the profits are mine in perpetuity. And Steve's like, okay. All the profits is in perpetuity.

Yeah. Oh, wow. In the show, they made it like, it was a split. And he's saying, you'll make a lot of money. Yeah. But I have the rights to it forever, but that's an even dodgy deal. Maybe it's, fuck, I don't remember. It could be.

But either way, he had, he kind of got one over him and he had more control. And they also made it seem in the show that he didn't know what in perpetuity meant. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, yeah. And he also sort of, he should have obviously taken it to a lawyer. Yeah, not just sign a napkin. So I don't know if it is completely the profits or, but Nick definitely had the rights. Nick was sort of the owner of the.

And he's got his friend who's a lawyer. Why didn't he show it to it? Yeah, I know. Why are you just having a conversation at a pub and signing an appkin? So Nick takes a group of the dancers on a tour. And, oh, would you look at that? It's huge. Massively profitable.

Where the original LA club could hold maybe two, three hundred people. Nick was booking venues for the tour that were holding four, five hundred, up to a thousand people. So these are these big theatre shows. And it's still probably for the best that Nick and Steve are managing parts of the business on opposite sides of the country. As Steve's resentment and anger just continues to grow. It doesn't really matter. A few people said it doesn't matter how much money he had,

how much success he had. This chip on his shoulder just never went away. Chipendale. Chippendale. My God, that makes so much sense now. And but it's not like it was one way. Nick, Denaena, how did he feel about Steve? I don't think they liked each other.

Right, but it was more Steve-hating Nick. In the show makes it like, Nick's like, I can't work in the same stage. of this guy. That's why he went over to New York. He's like, I can't deal with him. That's probably, that's true. Yeah, they didn't like each other.

And you said they had screaming matches. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They'd be toe to toe screaming at each other. Pleasure or pain. Um, mostly pleasure. Yeah. They go off on it. That feels good, Steve.

Fuck Fest 3,000! Steve, by this stage, is very wealthy. Certainly achieved the financial goals he had set out to. And like I was just saying, chip on the shoulder. With the rising popularity in Chippendales, more and more similar clubs were popping up. competing for their business.

Steve's paranoia and competitiveness was well known. In fact, he'd made some pretty extreme decisions in the previous few years. Twice, he had attempted to have a competing bar burnt to the ground. Wow. Just for existing. Did you say twice? Twice. First was Moody's disco in 1979 and then the red onion in 1984.

That's a terrible name. The red onion? It's a delicious vegetable though. Failed to burn down a competitor once, fall on you. Yes. Yeah. Yes. You know, you got it?

Burn down a competitor's building twice. Yes. Can't get burned down again. Now watch this drive. Yeah, he did fail. It wasn't successful either time. But it shows just how paranoid and volatile this man was. In the show, he did, he burnt down.

Yeah, right. It's so funny that they, I just don't get it. Why? I just wanted to be as accurate as possible. Yeah, then it may as well be a documentary. Okay. I think they make it, all right. They're like, I can make it more fun.

By burning it down. Yeah. So, yeah, he's volatile and he will go to extremes. And that became quite evident after a law student unraveled some pretty full-on practices happening at Chippendales. Don Gibson was a second-year law student at UCLA in 1982 and was at the time living near Chippendales. What I haven't mentioned yet is that Chippendales was women-only for the male review show and then opened to everyone else at 10pm and operated as a normal club slash disco. So one night Don and his friend Barry go to Chippendales to check it out and have a night on the town. And they wait in the long line and when they finally reach the front of the line, the bouncer asks to see their IDs.

And Don produces his California ID and the bouncer says, oh no, no, no, you're Chippendales ID. And Don's confused and the bouncer explains that membership is required to enter the club. And he explains that they have to go to this building down the road, you know, midweek, pay several hundred dollars for a membership. So Don and Barry leave, they're students, they're like, we're not paying hundreds of dollars to get a membership. for a club. So Don thinks nothing of it. Until about a month or so later, he runs into Barry again at uni.

And Barry mentions that he went to Chippendales on the weekend. And Don's like, really, you paid for a membership? And Barry's like, no, they didn't ask. Oh. And why is this a red flag? Because Barry was white and Don is not. Okay. So it's a made-up.

There's no membership. There's no membership. Don asks around to his fellow students and asks if they'd been to Chippendales. Every person of colour he asked said they'd been denied and asked for a membership. Hmm, it's not sound like a pattern. Yeah.

So he's like, and this is a law student and somebody who like, the whole way they portray him in this podcast is he's a very like righteous or like, he just wants justice and he wants the right. Anyway, so wrong person to kind of piss off, I guess, because he knows the process and he knows what to do. So he's like, something seriously illegal is going on, but he knew he needed harder evidence because, again, he's a law student. So he recruits two white classmates, Bennett and Greg, to help him in an experiment.

They go to the club together. Don even dresses up a little fancier and a little nicer than Ben and Greg are dressed. And they go to Chippendales together. Bennett and Greg get in the line first and Don lines up separately from them. And Bennett and Greg pay their $4 cover charge and get stamps on their hands and they're in, no problems. When Don gets to the front of line, he gets the same responses last time. Oh, you need membership. So Don's like, okay, no worries.

He walks away. A few minutes later, his friends. come out of the club and they find him. And they are pissed. Don explains that he wasn't as upset at them because he had experienced racism his entire life. But his white friends are like, the fuck? And he's like, yeah. So the three of them line up once again, this time altogether. And when they get to the front of the line, Don's two white friends point to him and tell the bouncer that Don was rejected because he's black. And the bouncer's like, no, no, it's because he doesn't have a membership. And Bennett and Greg lift their hands showing the club stamp and say,

neither do we. So they've fucking got him. So Don files a discrimination complaint. Finds out that they've heard many complaints, but no one had actual evidence that he had, and it meant the case could properly be investigated. What was his evidence? It was just like the two,

three of them with a corroborated story. Yeah, I guess so, yeah. Yeah. He wasn't wearing a wire. No, he wasn't wearing a wire. So Bruce Nahan. Like a camera in a big hat or something like. Well, I had it, partner.

I would just like entry into this here establishment. Could you just reject me and give me that membership spiel into my chance? Into my chance if you do not mind. I do declare it. I do declare you. Remember our lawyer who studied for the bar at the bar, Bruce Nayan, he tried to get the case to go away by offering Don free admission to the club for a year and a bottle of champagne.

Oh my God. French stuff. And that's $4 a pop. And then the champagne, who knows how much that is. Free and true for the year. You could be the only. black guy in there? Isn't that fun? Isn't that cool?

Just sign here on this napkin. Don is not interested in that bullshit. This case sort of goes on for years, you know, as it goes through like the slow legal system, it turns into a class action, including complaints from seven other black patrons who were turned away from Chippendales. It's drawn out. It's now a couple of years after Don was denied entry and he's working as a clerk for a federal judge.

And one day his work phone rang and the person on the other side of the phone said, is this the guy who's suing Chippendale? And Don said yes. And the person said he had something he needed to see and Don arranges the time to meet this person. Oh no, and I'm not feeling good about this. A guy shows up and explains he works for a car rental company and hands Don a notebook. The notebook was left in the car that was rented by somebody who worked for Chippendales. Inside the notebook was detailed notes about Don.

What time he left home where he went, details of his car, people who visited Don's apartment. Wow. Someone have been tracking Don for 10 days, at least. So Don contacts another lawyer and the police who say there's nothing in the book that indicates Don's life is in imminent danger, so there's nothing they can do, which I love. And months go by, Don's feeling like, he's looking over his shoulder this whole time feeling I'd be anxious. That does sound like research for a hit. Doesn't it? A little bit.

But there's nothing in there that, you know, screams suss or violent, so we can't do anything. What else would they be doing? Fuck, you find it's so annoying, isn't it? So, months go by and Don gets another call. This time from a dancer from Chippendales. Hadari Sababu, the only black dancer at Chippendales, informs Don that Steve Banerjee is so pissed off about the lawsuit that he's had someone following him and has now put a hit out on him.

Oh. Okay. So their original plan, apparently, was Steve was going to pay this woman like $5,000 to like meet up with Don at a bar or something, flirt with him a little bit. maybe go home with him and plant drugs on him and, like, get him in trouble that way. But Don's like a grad student and working as a legal clerk and stuff. He's like, I don't go out. So they couldn't get him that way.

So the next natural step is to have him killed. Whoa, they do not follow this storyline on the TV show. This bit doesn't get covered. Wow. I just thought it was really interesting because it just shows how paranoid and the extremes they'll go to. And it's also worth listening to this part in the podcast, Don is like, it just seems very cool. It's really well spoken.

It's great. So Hidarie agreed to make a statement under oath with a court reporter present. And when this court report was shown to Bruce Nahan, the Chippendale's lawyer, Bruce was quick to make a settlement offer. Two bottles of champagne. And free entry for two years. Two years. Even to you, Hedari, who works here.

Yeah, I'll let you in. So Steve Bannergy ended up paying 10K to Don, which is about $25,000 in today's money, with another 85,000 to be divided up amongst other black patrons that had been discriminated against as well. And Banerjee also agreed to allow black patrons into the club and vowed to ensure a quarter of new employees at the club were black and that he would do at least $5,000 worth of business with black merchants each year.

But Bruce Nahen says he's pretty sure none of that happened. Oh. So that's cool. But yeah, pretty fucking wild. That he's taking a hit out on somebody who's made a complaint about discrimination, which was proven true. You take a hit out on him. Wow.

Yeah, that's just how he seems to think can solve problems all of a sudden. Yeah, just people killed. Like burn down opposition, shoot people who are bringing court action against you. Pretty full on. But obviously he was talking on a recent podcast, so he's... Don. Don. Yeah.

And he's still, is he a judge or something now? Oh, good question. I don't, oh, he's a legal, like a law professor. Oh, right. Awesome. And he seems really cool. You did say it was well spoken. Yeah, professor.

No, no, I just, I just liked him. Like, yeah, I thought he was really cool and I, I didn't have to include that part of the story, but I thought it was interesting and pretty, pretty extreme. Does show what Steve is capable of. Yeah, yeah, the lengths he'll go to. Which is worrying for the rest of the episode. So the, and the fact that that booklet was found, is that what saved him? Yeah, I guess so, yeah.

Wow. Well, the book kind of like made him a bit aware that somebody had been following him, but it was really Hadari the dancer, who was like quite good. There's a whole big, like one of the episodes is pretty much about him. And he was fairly close to Steve, like worked quite closely with him, learned a lot from him and saw a lot of bad shit happen or be discussed. But this was just sort of a point where he was like, I couldn't live with myself if Don was killed and I'd known about it and I hadn't said anything.

Oh my God. Yeah. So he pretty much saved him. In the show, I don't know if it was the same name, but there was only one black dancer. And Steve was sort of like, he was the most successful dancer and stuff. And then they started doing calendars, but they excluded him from the calendars. He's like, it's okay for you to be in the club. This is what Steve explained him.

And he's like, what the hell? Yeah. I'm the most popular dancer here. Why don't you have him in the calendar? It's fucked. He's like, but, you know, on a white woman's wall, that just, that's, that's not going to sell as well or something. Yeah. I don't, yeah, I don't think Hidarie was in the calendars.

And he even explained that like, and it was also like, it was, I mean, obviously, as we've just heard, black patrons were being turned away. So it was an entirely white audience of women. But he, Hidari was also saying there were some of the, like, white dancers who treated him differently, who didn't want to be next to him on stage. because it made their tans look pale. Okay. The important stuff. So, yeah, it's so fucked. And it's funny you mention the calendars actually because I just have a short thing here.

There's, again, a whole big thing about it. But one of the big income streams, Fortune Modales, was their calendars. And one of the dancers, Dan Peterson, he branched out and did his own calendar with a friend of his. And of course, Steve's pissed off about that. So Dan got a phone call firing him. And so he just throws himself into shooting and selling his calendars, which are called Skin Deep. And while at the beach doing a photo shoot, Dan and his friend noticed little like puffs of sand coming up. And then like something hit the trash can near them and they realized they were being shot at.

What? I was like, well, they're being attacked by crabs? No, they're being shot at for doing a photo shoot on the beach and daring. Because I think in it, I'm pretty sure that it was. Dan explains it. Dan's fine. They were not successfully shot. mean successfully. Like, they try to burn down the place.

He's already failed two attempted murders. Yeah. But it was something along the lines of Dan said something about the calendars. And Steve was like, well, go do it yourself then if you don't like it. And Dan was like, oh, okay. Thank you for that permission. I will. And Steve was really pissed off about it.

So they were being shot at. And they hid behind something for like half an hour and still like unsure of whether or not they were safe. Fucking wild. Wow. They're being shot at for doing a photo shoot. Got behind a sandcastle. Yeah, just so paranoid.

I know. I invented male models. Yeah. That's like, it seems like he's like, and he kind of like, he made it a big thing. But if anything's successful like that, there's always going to be people coming in and competitors. But he's like, no, this is my idea. My idea is men taking their clothes off. Yeah.

That's mine. You can't take your clothes off. So dumb. He goes around at people at home. Having a shower. Having a shower. Yeah. Whoa.

Whoa. Whoa. Oh, oh, oh. She starts shooting at him. Everyone's got to shower in their jocks now. It's really confusing. Sounds like he's just also terrible at following through with his stuff. Yeah.

A lot of attempted stuff. Yeah, he doesn't really pull stuff off super well. Shooting at people. Except pants. No, he doesn't strip. But, you know, the joke was there. Yeah. I had to take it.

He also doesn't seem like he had any of the big ideas that made the business successful. Yeah. Yeah. Nick Danoia. Nick Denaoya made the big New York club. Someone else came up with the original idea. You know, he sort of started, he had the building and he sort of went along for his own ride a bit. Yep.

I don't know. He must have had some. So they'd be pride and like, he'd be frustrated by that too. He must have known that. So meanwhile, Nick Denault is in New York. A touring part of Chippendale's business is doing really well and Nick is making great money. Plus, again, he's doing TV interviews. He's being referred to as the founder and creator of Chippendales, which as we know is a

a real bug bear for Steve Banergy. And Steve had also had a major fuck-up with his latest run of calendars. He'd signed off on a design that had gone to print, and he'd ended up with a million calendars which had 31 days in every month. 31 days has September, April, June and November. All the rest have 31, even February. That's right. Especially on leap years too.

I mean, it's better to have too many days and not enough, though, right? Yeah, it doesn't feel like, because they had that in the show as well, and this was like, he was sort of under stress and stuff. He's just like, yeah, sign off whatever. And his dad, I don't know if this is true, but his dad's business in India was a printing was a printing press. And there was a flashback of his dad saying, you've always got to double check the proofs. And he's like, I'm just, I mean, if you have a calendar that says February 31, that's pretty funny.

It is pretty funny. But I don't think they were in the calendar business for funnies. They were in it for horny. Oh, okay. And accurate. Just get out your white out, you know, your liquid. Yeah. What do they call it?

Liquid eraser or whatever was called. Yeah. Paper. Liquid paper. So he was stuck with a bill for nearly $300,000 and a million calendars he couldn't sell. So he couldn't pin the blame on him, but he tried to pin the blame on a lot of people and they were all like, you signed off on this. Honestly, people buy those Chippendale calendars for the months.

Exactly right. For the days. Yeah. The first thing I do was rip out all the. Photos of the hunks. I don't want to see it. I just want to keep track of my social plans. I just use this as a diary.

I take it everywhere with me. I read it for the articles. And a lot of people say that his anger and frustration sort of became directed towards Nick. Even though Nick had nothing to do with this, but you know when you're already kind of mad at someone, you're mad at something else. You don't want to take responsibility for anything. So he was like, fuck that guy. I knew it. I knew Nick's at the bottom of this.

Yeah. So he'd just taken a big financial loss. Nick was doing well with the touring show, so I think he's just kind of very resentful. Meanwhile, Nick has had enough of Steve's bullshit. He's planning to leave Chippendales and create his own company, one that will rival Chippendales. So, and Nick shared an office in New York with two talent agents, Robin Vores and William Mott. And the three of them spent so much time together, they became quite friendly because they're all kind of sharing this office space. And it was back in the day before cell phones, obviously.

So they'd be waiting around for phone calls or they'd, you know, if somebody's popping out for lunch, should be like, hey, I'm expecting a call. Could you, you know? So they become quite friendly. Robin recalls Steve coming to the office one time and Nick seeming quite nervous in the lead up to their meeting. And it's assumed that in that meeting, Nick probably told Steve that he was going to leave Chippendales.

But she was like, I couldn't, you could hear when like Nick was having a screaming match on the phone or something. It was a pretty thin wall. But she couldn't hear anything from that meeting. So that's just what we assume. Would the idea have been that he would have kept the Chippendales tour going? I don't know. Yeah.

I'm not really sure what the... He had the rights sort of in perpetuity, but if he's leaving Chippendales... Yeah, does he then just rebrand that tour and keep it going. In the show, this happened early. You know, they've flipped around the time-ons and all this sort of stuff, but he tried to leave earlier before starting the New York Chippendales. And his idea, and I don't know if this is real. And I think he did copyright the name or whatever, trademark the name,

but he was going to call it US Mail. M-A-L-E. Oh, okay, that's good. We deliver. Yes, that is true. Yeah, it's pretty fun. He was going to make it US mail. On April 7, 1987, a guy walks into their office on the 15th floor of a building in New York.

Will's there and sees a man holding an inter-office delivery envelope and a Burger King cup. And the guy asks, Will, are you Nick Danoia? To which he responds, oh, no, he's in there and points at Nick's office. And the guy says, oh, thanks, I'll be back and walks out of the office. And Will thinks the interaction is weird, but he sort of goes about what he's doing. It's like 3.30 in the afternoon. He's going to take off for the day. He goes down to use the bathroom before he leaves.

And in the bathroom, he sees the guy from a moment before. The guy seems kind of nervous. He's splashing water on his face. And the urinal's like right next to it. So he's like, I'm going to go into the stall rather than this guy's... Yeah. This guy's a bit odd. So he goes into the stall.

By the time he comes out, the guy's gone. As he's washing his hands, Will hears a gunshot. No. Nick De Noier had been shot and died instantly. In his office. Yeah. Just these daylight shootings. I mean, it sounds like, a witness, like a guy in another room, he's seen you.

It sounds like absolute amateur hour. Steve, what are you doing? Yeah. When the news was broken to the Chippendale dances after a show one night, well, that night, I would say anger erupted in the green room. Someone exclaimed, I'm going to kill Steve Banerjee. Everyone immediately thought you. Everyone immediately knew.

Right. Wow. Like, they knew that even though Steve didn't pull the trigger, he was responsible for They knew it immediately. Everybody suspected it, but like, they kind of suspect where you know, you know. Right. Oh, that's interesting the show. They didn't make it seem like it was so obviously known.

People were still sort of shocked and stuff. No, it, well, apparently. There was a burglary gone wrong or something like that. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, apparently they were like, fucking Banerjee. Kamal played it, like, the Steve character was like, so obvious, like, oh, what? What? What would have happened?

Oh, it must have been a burglary good. gone wrong. Yeah, yeah. It's like, why do you know anything about it? Yeah. You know what? I never thought about it, but it's, what a shame that Kamal was in this show about buff strippers.

And he's so buff. Yeah. But he never, I don't, you never, never saw him with the pecs out. Yeah, it is disappointing, isn't it? Hmm. Rolls? Yeah, like me. Me, you.

All the greats. Robin Williams. He's good at the serious stuff. I mean, Robin Williams went to Juilliard as we learned. Anyway, so Banerjee ends up buying the rights to the Chibendale Tour from Denaway's widow. And with a napkin deal now gone, people estimate the Banergy's making around 100K a week from the tour alone. Wow. He's making sweet, sweet cash.

That's cute. In 1990, with the original club in L.A. having been shut down a couple of years earlier prior to, like, alcohol violations, Banerjee approached a London music agent and promoter, Carl Leighton Pope, with a proposal to take Chippendales to a European audience. No real surprise, the tour is hugely successful. It's massive. But no matter this new success, Banerjee is still paranoid and obsessed with any potential competition.

He's particularly pissed off by another travelling male review, Adonis. Most of because it was started by a couple of former dancers from his LA club. So they're another American group. They're doing a few shows like around the US. And he's like, these fucking guys. I know. His two is killing it. It's like the name brand.

It's the big one. And he has to be the only one. He just, yeah, he thinks that, yeah, too paranoid and it just tears, it tears him apart. Yeah. And he like, I mean, obviously not quite right. Yeah. Just because like Nick was going to leave so he killed him. Yeah.

I don't understand the psychology of it all. No, it's really strange. On July 23rd, 1991, a Blackpool detective by the name of Graham Gooch. Oh my God, the English vatsman? Yeah, same guy. Graham Gooch, yeah. Bloody hell. He received a phone call from the FBI.

Oh. They informed Detective Gooch that they had received a tip-off that a hit man was coming from America with the intention of killing some of the Adonis dancers who were about to do a show in Blackpool. Okay. And he's like, what? What? Detectives watched, they went straight to the theatre, they chatted to the Adonis dances, they watched over them for a couple of days and their shows went on as planned.

The FBI called a few days later to inform Detective Gooch that they had the alleged assassin in custody and the Adonis performers were safe for now. As it turned out, the hitman had been given the wrong dates and it arrived in the UK too early and like kind of decided to bail. He's using a calendar with 31 days. No. See? And you were saying it doesn't really matter.

You're right. You're right. It does matter. So embarrassing. God, I just feel this guy's so stupid. Steve was like, oh, I've got a million of copies of these. I can't sell them. I'll give him to my hit men.

I've got quite a few of them. I've got so many hitmen. I love how disappointed Dave is in Steve Banergy unsuccessfully killing people. It's absolute amateur. Who said it was Steve Banergy? Oh, sorry. I don't know.

Who said it was Steve Banergy? No, that's a good point. That is a great point. The hitman had been hired by. Yes. Ray Cologne. Oh, what the hell is that?

Well, Ray was the guy that Steve Bannagee would always do when he needed help doing something illegal. I thought this was a twist for a second. It kind of is, but it's also not at Steve Bannage. Steve Bannage, for sure. It's not his real name, Shirley. Hi, I'm Ray Cologne.

You can trust me. No, I can't. No, I can. You're Ray Cologne. He definitely made up the name looking at some sunglasses and then a toiletry bag. Ray, Cologne.

It's also spelled colon. So I reckon it's probably... Oh, his name's Ray Colan. Ray Colan. And he's like, it's Collin. It's pronounced Colin. It's Burk! It's Bucke!

Rets! It's Whee-Zat! It's the same vibe. I love that joke every time. Whoever it is. Whatever it is, funny every time. So Steve had asked Ray to help him do something about the Adonis show and Ray had gotten in touch with a hit man known as Strawberry and offered him 25K ahead. Oh my gosh.

To go to the UK and kill two of the Adonis dances. Trust a guy called Strawberry. Come on. I don't know which specific two, not sure. But Ray had provided strawberry. Yes the two LA ones, maybe the ones are used to work from? I don't know. It might not have been.

Ruh. Because they were the ones who started Adonis, but I don't know if they were necessarily on the two, who knows? He might have been like, you choose. Yeah, dealer's choice. I just want two dead. Just give me two? So they know it's not an accident or, you know, a coincidence.

But like, strawberry obviously can't take guns with him on an, on an international flight. So Ray just gives him cyanide. Which you can take. You can. Oh, definitely take that. With Strawberry and FBI custody, the FBI came up with a plan. They got Strawberry to call Ray, who didn't know he wasn't in London, as if he was just calling to like, let's just talk through the plan one more time, just so I'm clear before I go and definitely do it right now because I'm in London. Yo.

And I need you to speak clearly. Yeah, into this telephone. So this allowed the FBI to record the conversation in which Ray explained to hit the Adonis men over the head with a brick. Oh, gosh. And then inject them with cyanide. And they're in the podcast series, they're talking to the detective like, is that, like, you get needles in the hits often? And he's like, no, it's not really what we're used to seeing. He's delightful.

Anyway. So it's a really weird and convoluted way to kill someone too. God, these people are so stupid. Really stupid. They get Ray on tape saying this. And then they search his home three days later where they find three bricks. 46 grams of cyanide hidden in a canvas bag with a hand-drawn skull and crossbones on it. When you say hidden, call that hiding in plain sight.

Yeah. And it says like, do not open. Poison, do not open. I need this for a hit. So he said 46 grams. In brackets, I mean killing someone, not taking myself. 46 grams is enough to kill over 230 people. Oh, wow.

You did not need a lot of cyanide to kill you. How many members of Adonis are there? Oh, 230. If you want a job done well, do it right with way too much sign on. Yeah, wow. Hit him with a brick and then injecting. It's not a... So weird.

Yeah, 239 bricks as well. Just in case. You need a clean brick for each hit. So Ray's arrested and charged for murder for hire and he sits in prison for seven months. Eventually, he decides to cooperate with the FBI to help them bring down the man behind all of this. Steve Bannerjee. Right. Ray tells the FBI about how Steve threatened him and blackmailed him into helping him get rid of someone back in 1987.

Now, everyone knew deep down that Steve was behind Nick's death, but before now, no one had been able to properly connect the two. Ray's admission to the FBI began an almost two-year cat and mouse chase with the FBI calling the shots and trying to get Ray into scenarios where they could get Steve to admit to the crimes. In the course of this two years, like the first step they did as well was got Ray to, like, record conversations with the hitman who had killed Nick and like, you know, get him to admit that. So they did that first. And then they wanted to get Steve as well. So it's, that's why it took such a long time. And can I ask, why did the hitman?

Why did he have a big cup from Burger King? Hard to say. Was the gun in there? Oh, no, I assumed that would have been in the big envelope. The envelope. I think that was just a drink he was drinking. It's a funny detail, isn't it? But wouldn't that, was this before, like, DNA testing?

Oh, yeah. Maybe, because otherwise the cup's right there. It was in 87, is that before? No, I think so. And then what about the cup? Like, did he take it with him? No, because that was still left in the bathroom. Will remembers that being still in the bathroom.

But he'd have to have, wouldn't he have to be on, like, in the database? Yeah, I don't know. I think he was like a, I think he was a drug addict and like they'd given him this job for drug money and stuff, which is really sad. But I don't know, I don't know heaps about it. And they do go into a lot more detail on the podcast, but I was like, I can't. It was like a 10-part podcast all an hour long. I didn't have the same amount of time, you know what I mean? How do you, you know, the idea of being like getting people to talk about the hit, wouldn't

you as soon as someone's going, anyway, let's just chat about some of our memories. Yeah, the good old days. Remember that time? I think about some of my great hits. What are the great hits when you think about hits? Have you ever killed anyone and can you talk about it in a sentence? Please, clearly. I can't just get a yes or no here.

Need you to talk about it. Bring it up. Yourself. That's just, yeah, just how I like to have a conversation. Look, I don't know how you do it in a way that... It's very convoluted. But it sounds like for two years they tried to get him to get... Well, they're trying to get him and Steve to talk to each other. But Steve, he's really... He's too scared to talk to Ray because Ray's gone to prison for doing things that Steve's made him do.

So he's really paranoid that Ray's dobed on him. So he doesn't want to talk to him anymore? He doesn't want to talk to him. And is Ray still behind bars this whole time? Well, he tells Steve that he's out of prison on medical leave because Ray has a kidney disease that he's been dealing with for years, so that's well known, but he's like, oh, I'm out so I could get medical care. Banerjee suss, but Ray's persistent and eventually convinces Steve to meet him at a hotel in

Santa Monica in the summer of 1992. The plan was that Ray would wear a wire and the FBI could listen into their conversation. But unfortunately, Banerjee outsmarted them and refused to speak. He takes Ray into the bathroom and writes answers to Ray's question on post-it notes and then immediately flushes them down the toilet. So they can't hear his side of it, which is, I suppose, pretty clever. Quite a few flogers. So we, like, he's on to him.

Well, he's just very paranoid. Yes. So they needed a new plan. So again, Steve being the paranoid man we know him to be, was desperate for reassurance that he was okay and not implicated in the crimes Ray was being investigated for. So the FBI came up with a plan to make it look like Ray was fleeing the country. They flew him to Europe and he called Steve and said, I'm making a run for it. I'm a fugitive.

Okay. And now the two agreed to meet up in Switzerland. So they meet for dinner. Ray's wearing a wire in his jacket, which he takes off and hangs on the back of his chair, meaning the FBI can't hear anything. No, Ray, you've done that on purpose. You idiot. So what they end up doing, there's a whole long part in the podcast, but I'll summarize it.

They're trying to, like, there's an undercover agent. They're trying to sort of signal to Ray to put your jacket back on. I don't think he gets it. So it's like the Swiss police go in and they, They like tell the matriot, you've got to close this restaurant down. So they close the restaurant. So everybody's sort of getting shuffled out. And Ray's like, Steve, you want to just come back to my hotel room?

We'll have a drink or something? And Steve's like, yeah, okay. So they go back to Ray's hotel room. But he leaves the jacket. They do this very similar in the show. Yeah, well, it's. Which I'm like, this is far-fetched. This restaurant is all of a sudden closing down.

And Steve's like, something weird's going on here. And the other guy's like, no, no, no, they close restaurants all the time. Some drink in the kitchen. It's Switzerland. Yeah, yeah, that's right. We haven't had our main yet, but we know whatever. Don't worry about it. I just want to turn the aircon up real high.

Make it cold. Jack back on. Yeah, there you go. So they go back to Ray's hotel room. FBI agents are in the room next door because they've booked Ray's room. Ray's room is wired and finally they've nailed it. The FBI can hear their conversation crystal clear. Ray and Steve, they're drinking.

They're chatting. They're talking about the arsons, the murder of Nick Denaoya and a bunch of other crimes that Ray has helped Steve with. Steve wanting reassurance that Ray hadn't mentioned his involvement to the feds. And Ray assured him he hadn't said anything to the feds about Steve. But Steve had just ratted himself out. Oh, got him. So on September 2nd, 1993, seven months after this meeting,

obviously still leaders together even more evidence. Steve Banerjee arrives at work at the Chippendale's office in L.A. FBI agents get out of the car, parked nearby and arrested Steve Banergy. He's like, apparently he's, hands were a bit shaky, but he seemed really confident. He's like, you got nothing on me. You dumb pigs. And they're like, actually, Steve, we do. Bannagie was charged on eight counts, including racketeering, conspiracy and murder for hire. The arrests made national news. And the same shows that cashed in on the rise of Chippendales are also reveling in its downfall.

They're loving it. Steve ends up pleading guilty and was to be sentenced to 26 years in prison. and Chipperdale's would be forfeited to the government. He keeps trying to like come up with, originally he's like not guilty and then he's like, okay, I'll plead guilty, but he's trying to protect his business over everything. Is it in the show his partner? His wife.

His wife is involved in the business. He wants to give it to her. Yeah. Is that, have you mentioned the wife in this? No, how accurate is that stuff? Yeah, Steve's married. Yeah. And I think from what I read, he, like, in the days leading up to his sentencing,

he, like, transfers everything over to her or, like, I don't know if he transfers everything to her or changes his will or something like that. Yeah. I think he transfers it over to her because the night before his sentencing, which is October 23rd, 1994, Steve Banerjee took his own life in prison. Oh. And in the show, they made it, like, because he was never officially found guilty then, and the government couldn't take the company.

So that's what he basically did it so his wife could have it. Yeah. And she still runs it, right? No. Okay. So she, essentially he's kind of like, would, I would rather die than lose the business. Oh, I thought, oh, it wasn't a, this is for my wife. It was.

Oh, I don't know. Right. Maybe. But then she sold the business not that long after. So I don't know that it. But I mean, that still, I guess, sets her up, doesn't it? Yeah. Because it's still going, I believe.

Yeah. Yeah, mostly just as a tour, and I think like there's a residency in Vegas, I believe, or like a pretty regular show in Vegas. But yes, Matt's absolutely right. Seeing as he was never officially convicted, it meant that Chippendales wasn't forfeited to the government and went to his wife, Irene, who, yeah, I'm pretty sure sold the business. I don't know how soon after, but she sold it. But at least, yeah, you're probably right.

It probably was more like setting the family, because I had two kids as well. So it was probably setting them up to make sure they were okay. but pretty wild stuff. So, Gilberto Rivera Lopez, the man who'd actually killed Nick De Noia, the hitman, was eventually convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. Ray Cologne pleaded guilty to conspiracy and murder for hire and received a reduced sentence for his cooperation with the FBI in bringing down Banerjee. The FBI agents that worked with him a lot, because they worked so closely together,

and one of them's interviewed a lot, and he's like, you know, Ray kind of, he seemed like a good guy, felt bad for what he did, and they sort of, made sure that like a big chunk of his sentence was in like a medical facility because he was quite sick with this kidney disease. So they kind of, they looked after him a bit, which is, I guess, nice. Because I think from the way that Ray spoke about in interviews and stuff, he died in early 2000s, I think. But the way he kind of talked about it was like he was, he was helping the FBI sort of as a redemption kind of thing. He felt a lot of guilt about the things that he'd done. Yeah, I guess that's a kind of nice of the cops to help him out a little bit.

But yeah, the story of the Chippendales has been told many, many times. There's podcasts, books, docos, TV movies and that series on Hulu that came out last year that Matt just binged. But that is the story of the Chippendale murders. I had no idea about any of that. Me either. It's pretty wild, isn't it? Wild.

I thought, honestly, I thought this is going to be similar to because we have done an episode on Hugh Hefter and Playboy a few years ago. Similar thing of like just a rise and. maybe fall, I don't know, but I had no idea that there was murder involved. Yeah. Absolutely. And I shouldn't have been surprised. I put up a few good topics, I reckon, this time. Yeah.

But this had murders in the title and it just swept the floor with all of the other suggestions. Everybody's like, oh, murders. And they made a good choice, as they always do. Yeah, it's very fascinating. But I really recommend going and listening to that pod. If you like this story, I've covered, you know, a good chunk of it and a lot of the main dot points, but there's a lot more info and in-depth stuff and really interesting stuff in that podcast. Welcome to your fantasy.

It's really, really great. But yeah, there you go. Excellent stuff. So good. Well, that brings us to everyone's favourite section of the show. We've lost Dave. He's playing with his dog now. I don't know if we said that.

We're recording it in his home. Hey, Humphrey. And Dave's getting ready to go to work. Sorry, Dave, that you miss out on the fun and the best part of the show. Oh, no. This means I'm going to have to do the terrible. I mean, great puns. And there's a lot today.

Oh, you son of a bitch, Dave. Dave. Anyway. So the way this works is really this last sort of 20, 30, 40 minutes of the show is where we talk about some of our great supporters. Without these people, this show doesn't exist. They support us at patreon.com slash do you go on pod. And if you want to get involved, you can go there and sign up on all sorts of levels, different amounts of money for different amounts of things.

That's right. Is that pretty well explained, Dragon Bob? That's perfectly explained. And the first section we like to do is the fact quote or question section, which has a jingle go something like this. Fact quote or question. She always remembers the ding. She always remembers the sing. And to be involved in this, you go to the Sydney-Shaunberg level.

Sign up there and then you get to give us a fact, a quote, or a question, or a brag or a suggestion. Anything. Or a joke, someone gave us recently. Yeah, we loved that. Happy to hear a joke. Happy to get a recipe. Happy to get just a compliment. I like a joke joke tag

occasionally you get asked for one and I'm like, I don't know any joke jokes but that one I have used I think if I remember correctly it was What did the elephant say to the naked man? What? How do you breathe out of that? Very good stuff.

He's talking about his dick The first one this week comes from Chloe Warren aka keeper of mums with old lady names and Chloe has offered us a fact writing. It's not exactly a very worldly or insightful fact, but it's true nonetheless. On a recent Patreon episode,

you ripped into a four-year-old for being called Barbara. I mean, fair enough. That's ridiculous. Oh, I love it. I'm sure I said the same at the time. You probably did, and I probably said it's ridiculous. And Chloe says, sorry to give those non-patrian stingy plebs

a free peek behind the golden shiny Patreon curtain. I don't like to think of them as stingy. No. I like to think of them as future patrons. You know, they say, Stranger's just a friend I haven't met yet. Yeah. A non-patrions just a patron I haven't converted yet.

They might be going through a conversion right now. Do you reckon you're selling it? Yeah, big time. You're a loser if you're not a Patreon. Chloe goes on to say, My grandmother, who we called Nanny, had a best friend called Barbara, who moved overseas in her early 20s.

Around the time Nanny was pregnant with my mum. Thus, my mum decided to name my mum, that's, thus my mum decided to name my mum Barbara. In honour of her best pal. She means grandma. Okay. Yes. That's my grandmother.

Grandmother decided to name my mum Barbara in honour of her best pal who she had been separated from. My mum does not like her name. She also does not like to be called Barbie, not surprisingly. Her middle name is Jeanette. So my dad always called her. called her BJ. This is no better than Barbara, though at least it has a different vibe.

I remember learning what BJ meant when I had invited a friend over for tea when I was little and she had to stifle her giggles at the dinner table. Thanks guys for your wonderful pod. I've registered to it all, I'm guessing, really listened to all at least three times. I just started a job as a cleaner and I hate doing it when clients are home because I'm often lolling at your pods. Cheerio, as my lovely nanny would have said. Oh, Nanny!

That's lovely. I love Barbara. Great work. Barbara's great. Great work, Chloe. I was going to say Chloe doesn't feel like an old lady name. No, Chloe's not an old lady name. The next one comes from Ben Johnson,

aka Schrodinger's Scat, saying this is a reference to my last submission about the gentleman wombat poo that I thought of too late. And Ben has offered a fact. writing, despite being confined to a wheelchair from an early age, Stephen Hawking never lost his love for wit and mischief. It is rumoured that Hawking would deliberately run over the toes of people that annoyed him. He ran over Prince Charles at his induction into the Royal Society in 1976 and ran over Jim Carrey's toes when they met in 2003, although I think Carrie was in on

the joke. Supposedly, one of Hawking's life regrets was never having the chance to run over the toes of Margaret Thatcher. When he was later asked about these rumours, Hawking said, A malicious rumour, I'll run over anyone who repeats it. Such a good sport. That's so funny.

That's very funny. I'm sure if Hawking were alive today, he'd run over the toes of a certain Dave Warnocky for not covering a certain book on a certain podcast. No, just kidding. P.S. Love you guys. Keep up the great work.

Thank you so much, Ben. We love you too. Next one comes from Nicola D. Nickyla D. A.K.A. DGO Junior Copy Editor and Collector of Interesting Words. Oh. And Nicola has a question writing.

What is your favourite punctuation mark and why? Mine is the Interrobang, a combination, a combined question mark and exclamation point. Oh. A sentence ending with an interrobang asks a question in an excited manner, expresses excitement, disbelief or confusion in the form of a question or asks a rhetorical question. Oh. Having just listened to the Clever Hands episode, one might use an interrobang an example. Your horse can tell the time at enterobang?

Well, that's great because I often use an exclamation mark and a question mark, but I didn't know it had a name, but then I googled it and it's combined. Yeah. I love that. Pretty sick. That is so cool. Dave, just quickly as you're walking past, what's your favorite punctuation? Are you talking about the interrobang?

Yes, so that's Nicola's favorite. Did you know what that was? Yeah, the one together. Is there a specific order though? Well, it's a question mark. It's combined. Oh, I didn't realize it was combined. I thought it was one than the other.

I would normally do, me personally, I would do question mark and then exclamation mark because it's a question first. But the exclamation mark conveys the way in which I'm asking the question. Fantastic. That's how my mind works. Yep. And I am a scholar. You are. Yeah, that's true.

In answer to your question, I do like an ellipsies. Oh, yeah. Heapsies also. I like that a lot. That's the dot dot dot dot. I love a dot dot dot dot. I'm a big dot dot dot dot. Break it down.

All right. Off you go. Keep getting ready for work. Thanks. I've got to go. I love you all. Bye, everyone. Bye.

Bye. Bye-bye. Dave, uh, Dave is. Dave was never seen again. He was never seen again. He's off to warm up a crowd on the project. Woo! God, he is good at warming us up.

Any big guests on tonight? Who you got? Dave Warnockie. You got. Dave Warnocky, the man himself. I'm like, I know that guy. I didn't look. Okay, hasn't looked, but probably someone big.

Nicola finishes by saying there is no Intera Bang available on Android or Apple phone keyboard. So if an app developer listening to this could work on that, that would be great. I learned something so great today, the Intera Bang. I love it. And if it's put onto my QWERTY keyboard, I'm going to be smashing that fucking key all day, baby. I love it. I think I love, yeah, I'm a fan of that.

I love the name of it. I think the other two that I would come to mind that I quite like. The at symbol is fantastic. Love it, yeah. Swirly. I love a swirly. Yeah. Swirley A.

Swirley A. And the other one is the ampersand. Yep, love an ampersand. Also a bit swirl and fun. Yeah, I think you're just like a swirl, don't you? Love a swirl. Dollar sign because I love cash. Yeah, also a bit swirly.

Bit swirly. I love a circle. I don't mind a semicolon. That's kind of fun. Jeez. Jesus, we love some of the... I think all punctuation is actually pretty sick. All punctuation is beautiful.

Yeah, I agree. Yeah. And yes, okay, thank you very much for that. That seemingly left field question from Nicola, but I loved it. I didn't think I'd have an answer to it, and then I did. Well, yeah, and I learned about Intera Bang. Finally, this week on the fact quote of questions section is Aiden Cranston, okay, rear brigadier of the Grenadier Frontier.

Oh, that is fun to say. And Aidan is offering a quote, which... Cheers. If you ain't first, you'll ask, Reese Bobby, beautiful quote. That is nice, yep. And I think I love a quote that makes you think as well. Yeah. And I love the work of Will Ferrell, of course. Who?

You mean Ricky Bobby? Oh, sorry, Rick. Reese Ricky Bobby. Yeah, is his name, is Ricky his nickname and Reese is his real name? I don't know. I thought it was just Ricky Bobby. That's what I thought too, but it says right here, Reese Bobby said this.

I wonder if that could be a typo. Could be. Oh no, Reese Bobby is Ricky Bobby's dad. Right. I'm so sorry. We were like, you idiot,

but you are correct. Reese Bobby, played by Gary Cole, does it. I love Gary Cole. And Ricky Bobby. Harry Birdman. Ricky Bobby quotes his father.

So good. Well, that brings us to the next section where we thank a few of our other great supporters. Jess, you normally come up with a bit of a game. Indeed, I do. Maybe we come up with the character that they perform as on stage. So we had like Cowboy Dan and like the Barbarian.

We come up with their characters. Sexy or not, that's up to them. Well, yeah, I don't think you hear Barber and you think sexy. No, but the way that that particular dancer moved that night was incredibly sensual. Yes. And I'm not saying these are necessarily sexy dancers if they don't want to be, you know, you can put your own kind of vibe on it but this is the character you're playing on a stage

and honestly if you don't bring a bit of sex you're probably going to get fired from Chippendales but up to you up to you no pressure if you want to keep your job let's make it sexy yeah that's all but also sexy is subjective yeah you know what I mean so maybe sexy to you

is like sitting down doing your taxes yeah I know what women want they want somebody to do their freaking taxes someone to be on top of it man I would find that very very sexy. If I could kick us off.

Please. Maybe we go one for one here. Okay, but every time we do that, you forget we're going one for one. I'll do the first five, you do the last four. Okay, great. First up, I'd love to thank from where is this place? Ootrecht. Ooh, where's Oortrecht?

NL. I'm going to against Netherlands. It is in the Netherlands. Yes. Yes, you did it. From Ultrecht, Utrecht, in the Netherlands. Netherlands, it's Ramona Harrison. The clog.

Oh, the clog. Like the shoe? Yeah. Wow. And that's all Ramona's wearing. Okay. Oh, okay. Not a full body clog.

Just one clog on one foot. No, two, oh yeah, two clogs, but just called the clog. The clog. She doesn't give her a lot of room to dress down from there. Well, you're, you know. But this is playing for the defeat market. That's right. They're in there.

Taking those clogs off real slow. They're like, well, all right. Someone's doing like a full body strip and they're like, nah. Yon, take off the shoes. Take off those socks. Yeah. I love Ramona as a name. Me too.

Thank you so much, Ramona, for your work and your support. I'd also love to thank from Anchorage in perhaps Arkansas in the United States. It's Liz Dean. Liz Dean. I once dated a girl named Liz Dean in high school. school. Does that Liz? She moved to the States?

Possibly. And now he's supporting you. That's nice. That's nice. That's a healthy breakup. I assume you broke up. Never officially. Liz?

What about Liz's a character as the Darsidly Dean? Oh, yeah. That's so good. Darsedly Dean. Yeah, that's fantastic. Comes out in like a Dean's uniform telling you off. That's hot. Yeah, yeah.

Telling you off a spike in the punch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. At the homecoming queen ball or whatever. Oh, yeah. Oh, it's Alaska. Alaska. Alaska. Okay, it's Alaska.

Sorry about that, Liz Dean. What a beautiful place to live. Anchorage in Alaska. I'd also love to thank from, ooh, address unknown. Oh. Can I help it feel that maybe from deep within the fortress of the malls? We can only assume.

It's Taz Media. Taz Media. Beautiful name for a boy or girl. What character is Tuz Media taking to the stage? Taz Media is a hedgehog. Oh, spiky. Yeah, taking out one spike at a time. Wow.

Kind of like, you know, that cabaret act where they're covered in balloons. Yeah, this is the reverse of that. Taking out spikes. Yeah. They're putting balloons on the spikes. Yes. That's hot. That is real hot.

On your tuss. Fantastic act. I'd also love to thank from North Perth in Western Australia, Claire McLean. Claire McLean. The toothbrush. Yes. Are you Maclean showing? Yes.

Wait and see. Ah, uh-uh. Yeah. Comes out dressed as a toothbrush and like squirts listerine all over people. Yeah. And as the, uh, the tricolour stripe. Yeah. Love that.

Love that. That's great. That's a good one. Thank you very much, Claire. I'd also love to thank from Kanata in Canada. It's Amanda Smart. Amanda Smart playing the nerd as sexy nerd. The nerd. The nerd.

And then Amanda takes off their glasses. Secretly hot. Ponytail. Secretly hot the whole time. Takes off the paint covered overalls. Yep. Oh my God. Stone Cold Hoddy.

Not another teenage movie style. Love that. Which is where I learned about all of my American stuff. Yeah. I'm coming queens. Yes. Lettamond jackets. Lettermans.

All the good stuff. It's my turn now to thank some people. I would love to thank from Westminster in Maryland, MD. Maryland, MD. It's Maryland. M.D. It is Maryland. God, stop doubting yourself, Jess.

I would love to thank Brett. On your, Brett. Brett. Brett. Brett is playing. The Super Soaker. Oh! Comes out with a couple of water pistols.

I reckon he also is like a fireman. Yeah. With water pistols. Oh yeah. And like... But it's tequila in the water pistols. Yeah. And he's wearing a suit of like filled up water balloons.

Yeah. And he sort of pops them with the double act with the echidna. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or the hedgehog. And so it's just like... We haven't mentioned the echidna. That's another person. That's another person.

We'll get to them. Yeah, that's exciting. That'd be fun. I'd watch that show. Brett will get you wet. That's what a sign. Yes. The Super Soaker.

And I would also love to thank from Richlands, Ritchlands in Queensland, Australia. Must be bloody nice. Love to thank Erica. Erica. Thank you so much for your support, Erica. And thank you so much for your dancing character. Yes. Which is Where's Wally?

Where's Wally? Where is he? Where's Wally's Pants. Yeah. Where are Wally's pets? And there's sometimes Erica does a team up with, you know, there's someone dressed as the wizard. Yeah.

Someone dressed up as Wanda. Yeah. Was there a dog? Wolf. Yeah. I reckon. Yeah. Someone dressed up as, uh, odd law, the bad guy.

Yep. Evil Wally. Evil Wally. Wait, where's Erica from? Eric's from Queensland. She gets Wally. Um, that's a good one. Hey, Woldo.

glasses and like a beanie, but you take those off. Oh, la la, la, striped bikini underneath? Sexy. That's sexy. I was thinking about when I was in America walking around New York at night by myself and I was wearing glasses and this group of, you know, 20-ish, some, they were a bit younger than me at the time. They would have been like 18 to 20 and I would have been 25 or something.

They were going, hey Waldo, hey Waldo, can I get a toe? Can I get a toe? And I didn't. To me, I just figured out what they meant. the same photo. Can I get a toe? Waldo, can I get a toe? Strange place.

A beautiful place. A beautiful place. A beautiful place. Fucking weird. Yeah. What I love about it is there's no where else on earth like it. You know? You could go to any.

They're number one. Yeah. Greatest of sit in the world. Yeah. I would love to thank as well from Niles, Michigan, Riley Johnson. Riley Johnson. Oh my God, that is a stripper name ready to go. Riley Johnson, the...

I reckon Lyndon B. Johnson. Oh, perfect, yeah. So he goes, you know, suit and tie. Comes out just one of Lyndon B. Johnson's classic speeches. Classic lines, yeah. And then... And it's beautiful. It's empowering.

Like, it's very motivating and, like, inspirational and then deeply erotic. He says, Lindenby president and Linden be horny. No spoilers, Matt just spoiled. Sorry, but yeah, that's one of the big fun of the big fun of. And finally, I would love to thank from Tampa, Florida, Samuel Orozco. Samuel Orozco. Orozco, that's a cool name. Well, from Tampa, maybe the Buccaneer.

That's their football emblem. Okay. So it's a pirate. Yep. And he sort of swash buckles onto the stage and, you know. Oh, he's a bit. She's his sword, you know what I mean? Already got like an open shirt kind of vibe.

Frelly shirt. It's flowing. Yeah. Long hair. Yeah, yeah. I'm thinking Fabio. Yeah, Fabio with an eye patch. Yeah.

That's sexy. And he swings across the stage on a rope. It's good stuff. Swabs a poop deck or two, if you know what I mean. Thank you so much. Samuel Riley, Erica, Brett, Amanda, Claire, Tuzz, Liz and Ramona. And the last thing we need to do, Bob. Oh, fuck.

And it's a big one this week. Oh, my God. We've got to welcome a few great supporters into the Triptage Club. Now, what is the Triptage Club? The Triptage Club is an exclusive club for people who have supported us on the Sydney Shineberg Deluxe level for three consecutive years, which is absolutely huge and amazing and so, so appreciated. Once you're in the club, you can never leave, but not in a creepy way.

Matt is on the door, he's lifting the velvet rope, letting you in. I'm behind the bar this week. we've got a tip and kiss. You can tip me and I'll kiss you. The difference is inflation from the 70s to now, you will have to tip me $1 million and then you can have a kiss. And we've probably got snacks too. And Dave usually, oh, Dave also books a band.

Are you going to book a band? I've got a band. Yeah. I've booked a band. It's funny that he wasn't here because I actually already had a band booked. Great. And I was going to wonder if hopefully he didn't have one in and I guess he hasn't.

So I've booked Alvin and the Chipmunks. Oh, great. Yeah. They're going to be playing all their chippy hits. Yep. You know, the Chipmunk song. Yep. You know, all the chipmunks songs.

I mean, all the classic songs sped up. Yeah, I mean, you don't have to tell us. I mean, we're all big Chipmunk fans. They're an efficient band, just looking at some of their hits here, like jingle bells. All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth. That's good. You spin me around like a record, uptown funk, which is from the Alvin and the Chipmunks, the road chip soundtrack.

Oh, cool. I thought that might have been from the squeakable, but it wasn't. Anyway, so, yeah, hang around for the after party. Now, how do we split this up? I read out the names. I'm on the door and you're going to be the Dave. You're going to be the hype man? I guess so.

Okay, you're on stage. I'm saying it. I'm going to bring them up. If you have a really good one, though, feel free. All right, let's tag team it. Whoever's feeling it. All right. All right.

We got a bunch to get through and these are all fantastic people. It's so great to have them here. There's like 17 of them. We're about to take this party up a notch because I believe this 17 is a real party posse. I agree. I wholeheartedly agree. All right, here we go. So first up, I'd like to thank and welcome in from Sosia in Mississippi, maybe MS in the United States.

It's Travis Alexander. It's about to get a little saucier in here. I'd also like to welcome in from, sorry, just checking it is Mississippi from Mount Riverview in New South Wales, Australia. It's Layla Booth. Layla Booth, Layla, Smooch on my cheek. Good to see you. From Portland, Oregon in the United States, it's Kel Wachaltz. From Kel.

Kel, you know what? The fragrance he admits is a delightful smell. Welcome in Kel. Yes. I'd also love to welcome in from Bell Park in Victoria, Australia. It's Robert Clark. From Bell Park, more like, ring my bell and park your car. Robert Clark's here.

From Cooperoo in Queensland, Australia. It's Alison Pottinger. Well, Cooper, who row to you? Come on here and take a sea. Get a drink. From Sacatabur in New York in the United States. It's Jim Bates. More like Jim Hates, not being here, but he's here right now and he's excited.

From Alvey in Victoria, Australia, it's Tyson Graham. Well, Tysom, help me. Tyson, love around you, Elba, because it's good to have you, Tyson. You make us lull radio all day and night. from Ames in I-A, Indiana, maybe in the United States. Welcome in Caleb Devick. I will be Devick stated when Caleb leaves the club, but that's not today. He's here.

From Iowa. Caleb was from, from Belleville. And she's, my God. Mississippi. That was MS. Michigan. Michigan. Welcome in from Belleville.

In Michigan, in the United States, it's Sam Cash. Bebub, beo, beo, peop, that's just me. Me throwing cash around. Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? And you've also got that air horn type thing as well, which is really bringing a vibe, which I love. From Address Unknown, can only shoot from deep within the fortress of the Moles.

Please welcome in Tarnie Hewitt. I, Tarnie knew it. There was a vibe in the room and I Tarnie's here. From Bally Claire in Great Britain, it's Katie. Welcome, Katie. Katie, my best matey. Welcome in, Katie. From Lutz in Florida in the United States is Marcus Smith.

From Lutz, he's Lucks. He brings the luxury. It's Marcus Smith. No, Clots. It's Marcus Smith from Lutz. From Auckland, welcome in in New Zealand. Ellen Gibbs. Ellen Gibbs.

Me. a warm heart. From Nottingham in Great Britain, it's Morton Smith. Morton Smith. Morton Smith. Morton Smith. You're my bay bug. Is Morton Bay Bug a thing?

No. From Bakersfield in California in the United States, it's Ashley Baker. Ashley Baker from Bakersfield? Are you kidding me? Is the town they've after you? You Maca's Mefield. Real good. From Basildon in Essex and Great Britain, it's Sean Benson.

Sean bends my son. He bends your son. And he does a fantastic job. Highly recommend. From Epsom. It's too many. In second last one in Victoria, Australia, it's Beck Razorbeck. Oh, Beck Razorbeck.

Beck, start and finish. Beck front and Beck to Beck. Beck to Beck. Welcome in. Beck to Beck hits. Yeah. And finally from Hillsborough and North Carolina where they've got blue fire engines some places.

Somewhere. In the United States, it's Am Jahe Chapel. Oh. Oh, going to the chapel and we're all going to get happy and fun. Having a great time with M. Jahi at the chapel. Welcome in. M. Beck, Sean, Ashley, Morton, Ellen, Marcus, Katie, Tarnie, Sam, Caleb,

Tyson, Jim, Allison, Robert, Kell, Layla and Travis. Make yourselves at home. Grab yourself a smooch and punch or whatever it was. Moose for me. What, you get to punch him. Like, smooch you punch him. I can punch then. Oh, yeah. That's a much better deal.

You can either tip me a million dollars and get a kiss or... I get to punch you. You can kiss me and I punch you. Okay, no, no, it's not. a great plan. I give up. I forget. No, don't worry about it. Welcome in all of you. And thanks for supporting us at patreon.com slash to go on pod. Now, Bob, is there anything else we need to tell people before we go? That if you would like to suggest a topic just like Melanie, Will Vickery and Bracken did for this

episode, you absolutely can. You don't have to be a Patreon to suggest a topic. There's a link in our show notes still, I think. It's also on our website, which is dogoonpod.com. You can support us on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash do go on pod and find us at do go on pod across all social media. Oh my God. Now what does Dave say at the end? Dave usually says, you say, now boot this baby home. Now boot this baby home.

And Dave says, well, until next week, we would just like to say thank you and goodbye. Later. Bye. Don't forget to sign up to our tour mailing list so we know where in the world you are and we can come and tell you when we're coming there. Wherever we go, we always hear six months later, oh, you should come to Manchester. We were just in Manchester. But this way you'll never,

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